Journal
JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY C
Volume 120, Issue 16, Pages 8986-8991Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.6b01660
Keywords
-
Funding
- NSF of China [91334203, 21274011]
- National 863 Program [2013AA031901]
- BUCT
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Shale oil is an important unconventional resource gathered in shales with nanoscale pores. In this work molecular dynamics simulations were performed to investigate the diffusion of shale oil in the clay-rich shale. The montmorillonite model was used to represent the clay-rich shale, and octane was used as a shale oil model. Results show that the diffusion coefficient of shale oils is extremely small in the basal spacing of 2.8 nm, and with the increase of basal spacing, the diffusion coefficient increases by several orders of magnitude. This observation indicates that once the shale oils flow from microscopic pores into the mesoscopic pores, it would be accompanied by the decrease of oil density and extreme increase of diffusion coefficient, which is very beneficial for exploitation of shale oils. However, it is still difficult to exploit the oil molecules adsorbed in the microscopic pore. Besides, by exploring the effect of chain length of the oil molecule on the diffusion, we found that the shorter chain oils are beneficial for exploitation. It is expected that these simulation results provide useful reference and important fundamentality for the investigation of shale oils.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available